


stereless withinne a boot

by dissembler



Category: A Knight's Tale (2001)
Genre: M/M, tipsy sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:40:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26191312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: Sir William learns that there are merits to both the complicated and the uncomplicated.
Relationships: Edward the Black Prince/William Thatcher
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	stereless withinne a boot

The prince’s guards have long since come to terms with the circumstances of his birth; they tease him now for other things, like the fact he still can’t get his words out a lot of the time and that he starts tripping over his feet in the mud the moment they make camp. So, the guard who announces his presence at the flap of the prince’s tent is failing to stifle his laughter and William himself has to school his face to seriousness as he’s beckoned in.

Inside, the prince lies on a mattress thrown over with furs, with one hand around a goblet and the other holding open some scroll of parchment in front of him. Without looking up, he gestures for William to come closer. And then he does look up. “You look pink, what’s happened?”

William can’t help an embarrassed smile. “The mud, my lord. My feet keep sinking. We all had a bit of a laugh about it.”

“A laugh?” The prince smiles crookedly. “At you, my favoured knight? Should I have words with them?”

He is teasing, but William has come to know that the prince is almost always teasing even when there is true intent behind his words. “No need, my lord. Your guard treat me well.”

“I am glad of it. Come, sit. I’d summoned you to look at these maps with me, then I saw how dark it was getting.”

William perches half on the mattress edge and half on the rugs that cover the ground. The prince, who saw him for what he was and raised him to a knight, has since taken interest in his life. He has been taught to read, to write; has been given a manor and been allowed to let Wat and Roland run it; he is betrothed to Jocelyn, though they will not marry until these campaigns are over. He still cannot quite believe it, does not quite see the parity between his tilting against the prince and all this good the prince has done him in return. Still less does he understand why the prince talks to him so much, brings him into look at maps and talk of strategy when he is just a simple squire turned simple knight.

“And now, my lord?”

“Now I think we should drink.” The prince lets the scroll furl back up and reaches over to the bedside for a stoppered wineskin and another cup. He passes both to William who uncorks the wineskin and fills the prince’s goblet before his own. The prince toasts him, they drink deeply and the prince begins to tell him how close they are to forcing the regent into pressing for peace. 

As he listens, and drinks, again it strikes him how impossible it is, sitting in a prince’s tent and hearing talk of kings and regents, and drinking royal wine that William is still so unused to. Just one cup makes him feel light and untethered, loose and easy. His cup fills again and again and William drifts amongst his changed stars.

When he makes the effort to focus again, the prince is smiling at him and he drops a hand upon William’s shoulder. “You shall be home soon enough, Sir William. Home to your pretty Jocelyn.”

William smiles and thinks of Jocelyn. _Jocelyn_. “She wrote to me again,” he says, because Jocelyn still confuses him and the prince is older and knows more of the world and even in his cups must surely be able to help. “She keeps asking how the war is going.”

The prince groans and shifts to sit closer to William, knocking their shoulders together in sympathy. “They do that.”

“But she can’t possibly want to know about it.”

“She doesn’t.” The prince gestures with his goblet. “Women are all for war in abstract–”

“Exactly!” A dim and distant part of William is aware that he just cut off a royal, and that his voice may be a little too loud but the prince doesn’t seem to mind. “And I know that she won’t want to hear about the blood and the shite and the muck.” He looks despairingly at the cup in his hands, gold like Jocelyn’s hair sometimes, like the glint in her eyes. “I’ve no flowers to send her. No token.” He sighs heavily. “But if I send back a letter with nothing in it but ‘I miss yous’ she’ll think I’m withholding something. Then I’ll be in the wrong for not telling her all the gory details just as I’d be in the wrong for scaring or revolting her if I did. It’s all very vexing.”

From his back on the mattress, where he has sunk – when had he sunk? – the prince hums. “Women are vexing. A confusing bunch. Men are much more straightforward.”

“Are they? I don’t find anyone straightforward now. It was all right when I was just competing, I never really had to talk to anyone but Roland and Kate and Wat and Geoff, but now–”

“No, come down here.” The prince grasps William by the shoulder and pulls him back to lie next to him, then he turns onto his side. He’s awfully close, so close that William can see all the texture of the scar on his cheek. His breath, sodden with the wine, puffs over William’s face and his hand is still on William’s shoulder, warmth bleeding through his shirt to his skin. “Men are more straightforward.”

William, a man currently in bed with a man, retains his disbelief. It must show on his face.

“They are.” The prince shoves him, laughing. “They are. You always know where you are with a man. You’ve got head–” here the prince taps William on the forehead – “and heart–” here the chest – “and cock–” here the prince grabs William’s piece and gives it a squeeze. “And that’s all a man is. Women are entirely different, all air and mystery, and much more difficult to please than a man.” He leaves his hand on William’s thigh. “Men are uncomplicated.”

William’s face is heating. He’s always quick to blush at the bawdy talk between the soldiers as they march or ride and it shows his inexperience for having only been with Jocelyn. But at least he has been with a woman. This, though, lying in close quarters with another man – a prince! – and having that man touch him without any hesitation or the easy meaninglessness of touches he knows from his friends… This is all new, startlingly so, and it may be the wine but just as startlingly: he doesn’t mind the prince’s hands on him. He’s interested in how easy men are to please, and in this man being the one to show him. 

“Are they?” he asks, and anyone who didn’t know him would think that guile came easily. But the prince does know him; he rises onto his elbow to look down at his hand on William’s body and must see, with how close it is, the evidence of his interest. 

The prince smiles, his own cheeks pink with the wine but his eyes dark and focused. “Yes, Sir William. They are.” His hand wanders up to the ties of William’s trousers, his fingertips curling underneath the tie at his waist. “Same equipment, you see.”

William nods and then finds himself curving upwards as the prince gets into his trousers, takes his cock in his hand and tugs. It’s been so long since he was touched like this by a hand that isn’t his that it hits him like a sword to the breastplate: with enough power to knock him on his back if he weren’t already there. He bites his lip around a curse. 

“Now,” the prince – though surely when you’ve had a man, no matter how high, touch your cock you get to call him by his name – _Edward_ says, slowly pulling William’s piece to full hardness. “This isn’t to say that all men like exactly the same treatment. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Some like to twist–” he demonstrates, pulling up from the base but twisting as he goes, and William’s hips stutter upwards as he makes a noise of bewildered pleasure– “some like to tease–” here the prince runs his a fingertip over the slit, gathering the beads of premature seed and then drawing it down the length of William’s cock with a feather light touch. William grabs his wrist and pulls until Edward’s hand is pressing his cock hard against his stomach, leaking into the hair there. 

“Ah,” Edward says, getting the picture. “I see even in this that you and I are very much alike.” 

After a short amount of wriggling, during which William’s cock is not being touched and he feels that he might die, Edward has two hands to work with and holds the tip of William’s cock to his stomach with one while he strokes the palm of the other up and down the underside of the shaft. It’s good, it’s very good, and William finds himself thinking of Jocelyn, that he’ll have to tell her that this is how he likes it, and ask her how she likes to be touched in return. Is this adultery if he is not yet married? No, this isn’t adultery, man with man is the other thing. The prince doesn’t seem to mind, and he’s in the same position, betrothed but not married, and doing unto man.

Edward changes his grip, and William’s cock springs from his belly to be taken in hand again and pulled faster. He sprawls his legs on the low mattress, on the furs, as his balls pull up and his moment comes closer. “You see,” Edward says, at the last manhandling William into the heat of his body, pressing William against himself as he twists his hand just beneath the head of William’s cock in a finishing blow and William gasps his release into the juncture of Edward’s neck and shoulder even as he spills on his shirt. “Men are uncomplicated.”

As William pants against salty skin he remembers that the truth of teaching is in the replication, it has been in jousting and swords and it must be here too, and so blindly he reaches down. After taking up some of his own seed, he finds Edward’s trousers tied the same as his were just in better material, and he delves his hand beneath. He swears he can hear Edward’s crooked grin as he slickly takes a hold of his already rigid piece. 

Edward had said that in this they were alike and so William presses his shaft to his belly and rubs over the underside, and with his head tucked against Edward’s throat he can feel as well as hear each groan and intake of breath. He then shifts his grip and tries the twisting one, which quickens Edward’s breathing and pulls noises almost like laughter out of him. Edward sounds like he’s wounded when he’s touched like this, and he moans his approval when William goes back to pulling his fingers up the underside. 

Unsurprisingly, being older and clearly much more experienced, Edward lasts longer than William had. He makes sure that William has taken all of his teaching to heart before he finally digs his hands into William’s hair and spills over William’s hand and up across his much abused shirt. After, he pulls William’s head away from his shoulder by the hair as if daring him to speak. This is another thing William has come to know of the prince: daring is rewarded.

“I still don’t know what to write to Jocelyn,” William says, and the prince shoves him away, laughing. 

“Of course you don’t: _complicated_.”

William thinks that there are merits to both complicated and uncomplicated and that he’ll think about his letter to Jocelyn tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> I have wanted to write these two for y e a r s. Thanks to SAMEflash for giving me the opportunity to delve into my fic list and drag out all the medieval ones. 
> 
> Title is Chaucer and though they are not steerless within a boat they are bamboozled by women. And drunk.


End file.
